Samizdata

Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus

– J. K. Rowling (…whom the Samizdata Illuminatus happens to think is rather desirable)

I’ve been a Belfast resident for over a decade, long enough to be familiar with the sounds of mortar bombs, thousand pound fertilizer based explosions, gunfire… and walking in funeral processions. So I know about war zones, although I would be the first to admit that I missed the worst of it by far. I am an American ex-pat, not so much because I left the USA as that I came to Ireland. In the decade plus that I have lived here, it has become my home. But on September 11, 2001 I could not ignore the fact that my people were attacked and slaughtered by madmen. The killing rage I felt was of a depth that I’m sure was a bit difficult for some around me to fathom. It was distant news to them.

The United States is big. It’s just so mind boggling big you can’t imagine… but at the same time it’s a small town. People travel widely; they don’t stay put so the interconnection of people from one coast to the other is extensive. Probably very few people in the country did not at one point or another entwine their lives with one of our war dead. For myself, the closest I am aware of (so far) are some alumni from my University, one of which I probably knew in my college days: Carnegie-Mellon University was and is a small world.

I grew up in a small town named Coraopolis just outside of Pittsburgh; I studied in Pittsburgh and I was involved in technology startups there before going to Ireland. I often travelled to Washington to lobby for the space program. I lived in Burke, Virginia for the better part of a year while on a joint project with Computer Sciences Corporation at an office just inside the DC beltway. My current companies largest customer, prior to the dotCrash, was in Manhattan. I spent nearly half of my time between 1997 and 2000 there and usually lived in the Lower East Side. I froze my behind off in Time Square for the New Year 2000 celebration. I joked with others about the manhole covers in Times Square being welded shut.

I know Somerset. I had friends out that way. I went to school with people from there. I skied up at Seven Springs every chance I could get.

I know Arlington. I drove by the Pentagon and across the bridge into DC night and day; I worked there, I played there, I had friends who worked for the DOD and in the Pentagon. I drove by it as recently as March because my other major customer is just down the road in Alexandria.

I know Lower Manhattan. I lived there. I sometimes watched the lines of aircraft in the landing pattern for La Guardia coming up from the South past the Twin Towers at dusk while I sat in my flat on Rivington and read after work. Or used the always visible towers to navigate my way home on foot after a night out in a newly discovered pub. My business partner and I walked around the World Trade Center just this last March on the way back from a business trip to Washington DC, before we caught a taxi to the airport for our flight home to Belfast. I was part of the tech staff on an internet broadcast from the Trade Center for the Western Governors University kickoff. I hauled racks of electronic gear in through the basement world of the WTC.

I know the places. I know the people. It wasn’t distant news. Atta and the other war criminals didn’t strike at some distant unknown place. They didn’t strike at my government. They struck at me and mine.

That is why I want the al Qaeda dead. All of them. Their excuses and complaints are of no interest: my heart is “hardened like a stone and my ears are deaf” to them. I wish them hunted down like the animals that they are, hunted as the Jews have hunted and hounded the Nazi monsters, hunted even when they become feeble dying old men. I will never forgive and I will never forget. An image of 5000 of my own people dying before my eyes on a video screen is seared into my soul and that of 280,000,000 other very ordinary americans. Our government has no choice in the matter. It will comply with our will or else we’ll elect one that will. It is that simple.

Our anger is deep and wide and very, very cold. We will give no quarter. We feel no mercy. We don’t want their surrender, we want them dead. To the last man. Dead.

Take it from me. The Pope really is Catholic. I live in Ireland. We know these things. I’ve also trompped around in America’s forests and I can likewise state with impugnity: “Bears shit in the woods”. They really do.

Now given these simple guidelines, why is it so difficult for the media to understand a similar tautology: “Civilians get killed in wars”. Sorry, it’s not nice, but dems de breaks. Innocent bystanders get killed in all sorts of random and horrible ways. Bombs miss (although that is becoming almost apologetically rare). Bullets, rockets and shells don’t go into orbit. As Myers, Rumsfeld, Stufflebeem and others have said in one form or another: “Stuff goes up, stuff comes down, people get hurt”. That’s gravity for you. It’s a real bitch ainit?

The guys on the ground aren’t very nice people. The Taliban are quite capable of killing Afghans and claiming someone else did it. They killed enough of their own before we got there, so why would anyone think they’ll stop now? And to top it off, there is a lot of shooting and shelling going on. The Northern Alliance isn’t firing blanks you know.

Lastly, there has got to be an awful lot of left over ordinance. They are still digging up and disarming bombs in London from the Blitz in 1940 fer crissakes! And that only occured for a few months sixty odd years ago. Afghanistan is filthy with unexploded modern ordinance from over twenty years of nearly continuous warfare. Civilians are lucky to survive walking to whatever passes for an outhouse in that sort of environment.

Could it be that the newsmedia focus on civilian casualties has nothing to do with newsworthiness? I have this deep down suspicion that we’re seeing the “civilian casualty” stories not because they are news, but because they are theater. Anyone with a theatrical background knows that “Kids and animals” always steal the show. The only thing that gets attention faster than a cute fluffy doggie and a towheaded (or turbanned) 8 year old are dead ones. That is what the news media is selling us. It isn’t news. It’s pandering.

Am I being harsh? Damn right I am. War is hell and nothing you can say or do will change it. Look at the aftermath of WWII. The ruins were filled with orphans, children with damaged limbs, eyes, souls. Terrible, terrible things happened to people in Europe. And yet I don’t think you will find many who would have preferred the alternative. Nor do many of us prefer the alternative of a world in which the horror of 9-11 is overshadowed by even worse events, one after another after another.

So let’s put our news focus on what matters. Winning.